The Girl Buried in the Woods

by Robert Ellis

  “You’ve come to arrest me for killing Colon,” he said.

  McKensie thought it over as he appraised him. When he spoke, his voice was scary quiet and overloaded with suspicion.

  “But you couldn’t have killed her, Jones. The results are in from her autopsy. She died exactly the same way the girl died. Art Madina performed the autopsy himself. He said everything about the two murders was identical. They died hard. They died like twins.”

  “But that’s my genius,” Matt said. “My alibi and my way out. I made the murders look the same because I was at the girl’s autopsy and knew exactly what to do.”

  McKensie’s eyes narrowed. “The way you’re selling it, Jones, if it ever went to trial, I bet it would play really well with twelve of our finest.”

  “I had a reason to want her dead.”

  “A good reason, Jones. Colon was a piece of shit.”

  Matt gave McKensie a measured look. “So you’re arresting me.”

  McKensie took a moment to think it over, then shook his head.

  “Not tonight,” he said.

  “Why not tonight?”

  “Because of Colon’s bodyguard.”

  Matt leaned against the fireplace mantel. It occurred to him that something had happened, and McKensie was getting off on watching him twist in the wind.

  “What about the bodyguard?” he said.

  McKensie crossed the room and switched on the lamp beside the couch. “The bodyguard was licensed to carry a twenty-two-caliber pistol. According to Madina and then ballistics, the slob was killed by a twenty-two-caliber pistol—same make and model. It sure looks good on paper, doesn’t it? The trouble is the slugs don’t match, and they never will.”

  “Raines told me that it had been fired that night. He accused me of shooting him with his own gun like I’m some kind of deadbeat.”

  “Raines gets off on drama because he thought he could get you to fold. But Speeks found the slug from the bodyguard’s piece when he went back on his own the next day. It passed through the wall and ended up in a can of Goya refried pinto beans.”

  Matt felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to stand on end.

  “What about the slug found in the bodyguard’s head?”

  McKensie flashed a short, dry smile. “That’s why I know you’re not good for Colon’s murder, Jones. By the way, your sales job was bullshit.”

  Matt shrugged. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “You ready for this, Jones? I mean, you look like you got decked in a prizefight and no one blew the whistle. Your eyes are still swollen shut.”

  “I can see just fine,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Okay, so here it is in black and white. You were right about some things. Turns out, a lot of things. The slug they pulled out of the bodyguard’s head matches the slug they pulled out of Moe Rey’s head. Ballistics called in the match. Same bullets shot from the same gun. One hundred percent certainty, perfect as the day is long.”

  Matt sat down in a chair and took a moment to let it settle in. He noticed that his fingers had begun trembling slightly. His heart felt like it was racing in his chest. When he spoke, his voice sounded rough, but he couldn’t have cared less.

  “What do you mean, same gun? Did you find Robert Gambini?”

  McKensie shook his head. “Not yet, but we’ve got the gun. We searched his house. One of the guys found it in a drawer by Gambini’s bed.”

  The revelation hung there for a long time. Finally. They’d put it together and Gambini was locked in. Matt needed it so much, he almost couldn’t believe it. He turned and caught a reflection of his face in the mirror by the front door. No doubt about it, the ordeal he’d been through had cost him this time around.

  “What about the gloves found at the Red Dragon?” he said. “What about Lane Grubb’s murder?”

  “Speeks is still working on it, but the DA says he doesn’t need it right now. The slugs and pistol are enough to get Gambini convicted. Besides, they’d try the cases separately, just in case they screwed one of them up or got a dog judge. Two murder cases means two chances to put the piece of shit away. You used to work narcotics—you already know all that.”

  Matt thought it over. What he knew was that Gambini had expected to find opiated meds, not cash, when he showed up to steal the truck. But that hardly mattered now. Gambini’s knowledge of what was being dealt and traded—the Grimm Brothers’ sick scheme to feed their greed and squeeze even more cash out of a fortune they already owned—had become irrelevant for good reason: at the time of each murder, Gambini had a righteous motive for wanting all four people dead. Whether they were somehow tied to what he assumed was a turf war over his drug business, or a witness to an execution that he had committed, or the bodyguard to someone like Dee Colon who was sticking her dirty nose into everybody’s business and demanding a slice of the pie—Robert Gambini had a reason to kill each one.

  Matt got up from the chair and looked out the window at the three cops standing before their patrol units with those shotguns.

  “If this is just a briefing,” he said, “and you have no plans or reason to arrest me, then why make the drive way out here? Why do it at four thirty in the morning? And why did you bring company? Why the heavy artillery? Why the shotguns?”

  McKensie gave him another long look with those green eyes of his.

  “Because Gambini’s still out there,” he said. “And this is one of those cases, isn’t it? When are you seeing your shrink?”

  “Why are you here?”

  McKensie walked back over to the slider. Matt followed his gaze through the glass to the tall buildings all lit up at the other end of the basin.

  “You’re still not ready for prime time, Jones. I can see it. You’ve still got those monsters swimming in your head. You need time to heal, time to forget—but I need a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  McKensie turned back and looked at him with a spark in his eyes. “Once you finish your paperwork, you’re on leave again, you know.”

  “You told me that at the hospital,” he said. “What’s the favor?”

  “I was hoping you might drive out to Gambini’s house in the morning and take a look around. It was the chief’s idea, too. It’s bad PR for the department that we let Gambini get away, especially after what happened to you. There’s a chance there’s something at the house, something he left behind that points to where he was going. Something the guys searching the place are missing.”

  Matt didn’t need to think it over. Robert Gambini might be brutal, but Matt felt certain that the heroin-dealer-turned-King-of-LA didn’t do anything without a plan. Worse still, time was rolling, and Gambini knew where the Brothers Grimm were keeping their money in the desert. Sonny Daniels, whom Matt guessed was unaware of Gambini’s knowledge, was trying to avoid prison time and had refused to talk.

  “I want something in return,” Matt said.

  McKensie shrugged as he opened the front door to leave. “Like what?”

  “I want to notify the Ramirezes that Gambini killed their daughter. I want them to hear it from me before it leaks out and ends up on the news.”

  “I’ve got no problem with that. But go over to Gambini’s first. The house is wide open. Speeks and his crew will probably be working the place all week.”

  McKensie acknowledged the three cops standing by their patrol units carrying those shotguns and turned back.

  “You want these guys out here to hang around?”

  Matt shook his head. “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  “Yeah, you sure look good, Jones. I’ll talk to you later.”

  McKensie walked out and closed the door behind him. Matt watched them drive off with their lights flashing in the night. When they vanished around the corner, he checked the time. It was almost five, but he wasn’t tired anymore and didn’t want to take the chance that he might slip down the rabbit hole again, launching another series of nightmares. Instead, he ste
pped into the kitchen, turned the light on over the stove, and brewed a fresh pot of hot coffee. Then he sat down at the table and opened the file he’d taken from Gambini’s house with all those photographs of the refurbished gold mine somewhere in the vicinity of Palmdale. After an hour of close examination, Matt realized that Gambini had been right. He couldn’t find a single landmark in any of the images. Sonny Daniels’s underground storage site could have been anywhere in the desert. Only Daniels and his remaining partner, Robert Gambini, and a couple of drivers whom Matt guessed were already dead knew where it was, so finding all that cash seemed like a shot in the dark.

  FIFTY-NINE

  There was something odd about Gambini’s house.

  Matt couldn’t pin it down as he walked up the driveway. All he knew was that he’d sensed something peculiar the moment he got out of his car and set eyes on the place.

  He didn’t think that it had anything to do with the lab’s evidence collection truck parked in front of the garage. Nor did he think the feeling was coming from the crime scene tape wrapped from tree to tree around the yard.

  It must have been the house itself that spooked him.

  It occurred to him that he’d experienced something similar the last time he’d been here—the night he broke in and found the house empty before Gambini showed up and surprised him. The place had the look and feel houses get when no one’s home. It was almost as if the building itself had checked out and fallen into a deep sleep.

  But the more he chewed it over, that really wasn’t it either.

  Matt shook it off and continued up the driveway.

  He knew with certainty that today Robert Gambini wouldn’t be showing up to surprise him. But even more, he doubted that the drug baron had left any trail at all. Everything about McKensie’s “favor,” as his supervisor had put it, seemed fabricated when weighed against the events of the past few days.

  The chopper pilot and the cops who disgraced themselves hadn’t just stopped Matt and let Gambini get away. They’d turned their heads while a person of interest in more than a handful of murders drove off carrying $60,000,000 in stolen cash with another $840,000,000 waiting for him in the desert.

  The words fuck up didn’t begin to describe the debacle. Matt guessed that it was a PR disaster that would live on the front page of the Los Angeles Times for a long time. And what about McKensie shooting a bad cop? That would play itself out on the front page, too.

  Matt walked around to the back of the house and held the kitchen door open for a crime scene tech who was pushing a handcart outside loaded with three evidence cartons.

  “Where’s Speeks?” Matt said.

  “In the next room.”

  Matt entered the house, stepped through the library, and spotted Speeks in Gambini’s home office rummaging through a chest of drawers.

  “You find anything?”

  Speeks turned and gave his battered face a long look. “Jesus Christ, Jones. What did they do to you? Are you okay?”

  Matt nodded. “Sure, Speeks. Never better. What’s the holdup on the gloves you guys found at the Red Dragon?”

  Speeks closed a drawer he’d been searching through and opened the next one down. When he spoke, he sounded disappointed.

  “We had to send them out,” he said. “They went to the crime lab at Quantico.”

  “I guessed that, but why is it taking so long?”

  “We’re not at the top of the list. Especially now since ballistics came through.”

  Matt sat down at Gambini’s desk, more irritated than angry. “I’m glad everybody in ballistics did their job, Speeks. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Actually, I’m not sure, Jones.”

  “I want the results from the gloves used to kill Lane Grubb.”

  “But even the DA doesn’t think we need to put a rush on it. Ballistics gave them everything they need.”

  “We don’t want anything to get lost, Speeks. Not in a case with a body count this big. Not with one of our own dead, and another, my partner, Speeks, with a broken leg. I want you to call the crime lab and tell them to push it through. If they give you a hard time, let me know and I’ll call them myself.”

  Speeks shook his head. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll give them a call right now.”

  Matt slid open the top desk drawer, found Gambini’s weekly planner, and opened it. “Before you go, Speeks, how about answering my question.”

  The criminalist turned and gave him an odd look. “What question?”

  “How are you guys making out?”

  Speeks’s face changed. “You know what it’s like?” he said. “It’s like we got called to the table on Thanksgiving after everybody else had eaten.”

  Matt kept his thoughts to himself. Speeks was saying exactly what Matt had been thinking ten minutes ago.

  “He’s not coming back, Jones. And he knew he wasn’t coming back. It’s pretty obvious that he went through everything and cleaned house.”

  “In his business, he may have just lived that way, Speeks. A lot of them do. Besides, he didn’t know he had a truckload of cash until he got there. If it had been drugs it would have been business as usual with no reason to run.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I forgot you used to work narcotics. But what a lousy way to live.”

  Matt nodded, looking back down at Gambini’s weekly planner and leafing through the pages. “Go call the lab, Speeks. Tell them the clock hit midnight, and we’re out of time.”

  As the criminalist left the room, Matt noticed that Gambini kept an orderly planner, which seemed to underscore his idea that the heroin dealer had every intention of returning home until he realized it was about truckloads of money. Names may have been reduced to initials or, in some cases, converted to numbers, but times and dates for meetings, dinners out, doctor’s appointments, and even errands like trips to the market or the dry cleaner were all neatly listed. Paging through the weeks and months, Matt had to keep reminding himself that this was still only January. Gambini’s entire year seemed to be sketched in.

  He tossed the planner back in the drawer and got out of the chair. On top of the chest of drawers he noticed a handful of family photographs set in silver frames. It occurred to him that Gambini probably lived a lot like his own uncle, Dr. Baylor. One was a drug dealer turned murderer, the other a serial killer, but both lifestyles would have required living in two separate worlds with two unique identities. Both lifestyles required a place to escape that was worry-free when trouble knocked on the door.

  Matt stepped into the hallway, found the staircase, and walked through the entire house, examining each room in the light of day. Early in the process, after only a bedroom or two, he began to sense something.

  That peculiar feeling was back. Stronger now. Fuller. Almost otherworldly. The impression seemed so palpable, and he couldn’t shake it. It wouldn’t fade or go away.

  Even so, by 3:00 p.m. he thought he’d seen enough to know that Gambini’s trail was ice cold. Nothing had been left behind that pointed to that second world where the drug baron might have fled. Matt imagined that with the cash Gambini had stolen, the man could get lost for a long time—maybe even find that place in paradise he’d mentioned—and never look back or be found.

  He walked through the kitchen, passing several crime scene techs who were removing the drawers beside the dishwasher and sink. Once outside, he crossed the drive for a look through the window at Gambini’s Mustang in the garage. The sun was kicking off the glass, and he had to move closer and cup his hands. For several moments he peered into the darkness, not sure about what he was actually seeing.

  The white Mustang was gone. But that’s not what made the view through the window so confusing.

  It was the car parked on the other side of the garage. The car that shouldn’t have been there. The car that should have been lost or stolen or driven off the Santa Monica Pier after midnight.

  Matt realized that he was staring at Gambini’s black Mercedes coupe.
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  He heard someone and turned away from the window. It was a crime scene tech placing another evidence carton on the truck. Matt pointed at the door on the side of the garage.

  “You guy’s got a key?”

  The man nodded. “It should already be open.”

  Matt tried the handle. When it turned, he gave the door a push and stepped inside. Still eyeballing the Mercedes, still incredulous, he switched on the overhead lights.

  Gambini’s car was not damaged, and Matt didn’t know what to make of it.

  He opened the bay door for even more light, stepped closer, and examined every inch of the hood and fenders. The black Mercedes coupe that had tried to run down Lane Grubb had been bashed in and wrecked as it bulldozed every other car on the street out of its way.

  Gambini’s car remained untouched. And after close inspection, he saw that the hood and fenders were not new, nor were they the result of a recent repair. The wear and tear on the car’s body appeared normal in every way. A small dent here, a light scratch there—normal, in every way.

  SIXTY

  The sun had set an hour ago, the air an unusual thirty-five degrees—way too cold for a January night in Los Angeles. Matt turned up the heat as he exited the freeway.

  He had been trying not to let his mind skip ahead, struggling to keep his imagination in check for the entire drive across town. It wasn’t until he reached Elysian Park and made the turn onto Casanova Street that he managed to pull himself together and calm down.

  He could see the Ramirezes’ home halfway up the block and thought about the first time he’d met Sophia’s parents, Angel and Lucia. They had already known that their young daughter was murdered and had spent the day watching the news on TV and waiting for someone to knock on their door.

  Yet tonight wouldn’t play like a next-of-kin notification. Matt expected it to be far more difficult.

  The pain and emotion—the weight of a mother and father’s love for their child and their loss—would always be something the Ramirezes would have to live with. But tonight, they would be hearing for the first time who murdered their daughter and why. Tonight, they would realize what a horrific twist of fate their daughter’s death turned out to be. That her murder wasn’t the result of anything she had done. That she was a complete innocent who, on the night of her fifteenth birthday, showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time and was murdered for something she saw.